In 1976 the renowned Polish director Andrzej Wajda released a film called Man of Marble. Starring Krystyna Janda as Agnieszka, a young filmmaker based loosely on his assistant Agnieszka Holland, Man of Marble had a complex narrative structure modeled on Citizen Kane, a technique the cagey Wajda used to get around Communist Party censorship. Unlike Welles’ Jerry Thompson, Agnieszka was not looking for the secret past of a well-known man, Charles Foster Kane, a multi-millionaire press baron and politician, but rather the secret history of her country’s past as embodied by an obscure man named Mateusz Birkut. Birkut was a construction worker who had gotten his 15 minutes of fame in the 1950s for the Stakhanovite feat of laying a record number of bricks during the construction of Nowa Huta, a gigantic housing project outside of Kraków. Then he had simply disappeared from history. It was a…